travels of discovery

Wheal Hughes Copper Mine, Moonta, South Australia August 14, 2008 from http://ournews.mobi
more clips from Terrell Neuage (http://neuage.org) at http://ournews.mobi/album.htm

Just read that Qantas may be taken over by Macquarie Bank Ltd. So having been victims of the lost New Zealand frequent flyer points when they gave Australia the slip a few years ago we, with little hesitation, booked a flight to Mexico City for spring break - end of March and first week April. So 2007 will be a big travel year, http://our-news.mobi

Of course, The Age (Australian news) today reports that Qantas is claiming that the frequent miles will be safe but we heard that when Westpac said some similar thing only to cut their points in half.

Not to worry we will take our points and run. Hello Mexico. Our goal will be to make this a totally free trip - well there is the $64 airport taxes and charges but otherwise the ticket is free. Our next goal is to swap houses in Mexico for a week with our apartment here in Brooklyn. Though most likely we will fly over to San Pedro, Guatemala (San Pedro: Guatemala's Bohemian Stronghold) and see my friend Dell - my friend from the 1960s who has finished building his house over looking Lake Atitlan.

Monday, August 14, 2006 ~ 6:41:05 AM

Last entry before heading back to the States. This has been a bit of a challenge doing these blogs and videos as we traveled; especially in Viet Nam and Turkey but the world is more wired all the time so we have managed to keep up. Our next travels will be even easier as we do more on our computer phone and use ipodcasting for our journal – our ipodcast will be from here for the rest of this year then we will have our own network.

Leaving Wednesday for Sydney and memorial for Leigh.

We get back to NYC on the 17th then we are packing our belongings and driving a 26-foot truck with our stuff to Brooklyn to our new apartment. Moving from our large Victorian house in Round Lake to a small one-bedroom apartment in Brooklyn. HELP!!!

We will be looking after and visiting my
father often – he turned 101 last April and is still going strong.

Next trip Christmas 06: Terrell in Sydney with Sacha for Christmas Day and Boxing day and Narda in Adelaide with family then we are both in Adelaide until January 3rd; to Las Vegas for a few days then back to NYC.

March or April we are taking a ten-day trip to visit Dell in Guatemala, our first trip to South America.

June 2007 – we are buying our tickets for that today (we don’t let what is happening with the airlines slow us); Warsaw, Poland for ten-days; Scotland for a week and Narda is attending a musical festival-thingy with me in tow in Wales July 7th or so for a week then to Cambodia for a week and back to Australia for the rest of July and August.

We will continue to add videos on our youtube video site; begin using my (Terrell ) blog continuously, add the final
videos (Sydney for August 16, 2006) later this August and some past videos to our trip 06 site, continue to add photos to our flickr
site (slide show) and to our yahoo
albums and work to earn money to pay for our travels.

I will be working on a book on online communication methodologies with Jackie Cook (University of South Australia) and I will have notes as that continues as well as I am close to finishing my book; Leaving Australia which currently is much longer than my 150,000 word PhD thesis…

Any break from work is good. Adding Paris to it helps even more.
Of course we have photos: http://www.neuage.info/Paris/index.htm

We took Amtrak down to the City, the Long Island train to the Jamaica stop and the new shuttle train to the British Air terminal.

I was feeling burned out from work and the last seven books I read (in the past three months – after returning from Australia in September I decided to get caught up with “technology” now that I am teaching a course ‘Essential Technology’ – I have been reading books that have made my brain spin.

• "The Singularity is Near" Ray Kurzweil
• “The World Is Flat” Thomas Friedman
• "Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century" Howard Bloom
• "Prey" Michael Crichton
• "Radical Evolution" Joel Garreau
• "Reading the Enemy's Mind; Inside Star Gate - America's Psychic Espionage Program" Paul H. Smith
• "The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence" Ray Kurzweil

Nanotechnology’s grey goo(1) had already started growing in my consciousness). I needed something mindless and lighthearted. I began reading “Bob Dylan – Chronicles, Volume One” Bob Dylan, between NYC and London and by the time I got to Paris it was close to being finished. I completed the book sitting in a café in Paris. It was such a refreshing change from all this technology shit. It was a refreshing change from any other autobiography I have ever read. I never imagined Dylan being impressed by anyone else, or having heroes – but he comes across in this book as a starry eyed adolescent that is in awe of others.

This is a very impressive and of course easy and quick read.

It also brought me back to my years in the mid to late 1960s as I lived in Greenwich Village and went to the same coffee houses that Dylan sang in. By the time I got to the village though Dylan was already famous and I never did see him there. It would be years later, about 1973 when I would take a train from New Orleans with Robyn Harper (who died last year) to Memphis to see Dylan play with The Band. I saw him at a concert with Tom Petty in Adelaide, South Australia in the mid-1980s and that is it. I was such a fan until about his “Saved” album days which I think was early 1980s. I saw him in Adelaide even though I had not heard anything from him for years. He did not seem very animated in Adelaide. Just ran through his songs and did not engage with the audience and then left. Tom Petty was much better. I saw him on the television last year singing country and western songs. So reading this book, which was about the early years of his career, was good. It went up to about 1970 and that is about as far as I got with him, except for the concert with The Band in Memphis.

We did all the usual tourist things in Paris.

Saw the Eiffel Tower and those museums the guide books say not to miss and the boat ride and some other things and we went by the Café de Flore on the Left Bank in Paris, where Jean-Paul Sartre wrote the immortal line, "Man is condemned to be free." I read lots of Sartre books when I studied him and the rest of is ilk for my Bachelor’s degree.

Always thought it would be good to sit in the restaurant he wrote in but as it was a snowy and cold evening and everyone in the café looked like losers (losers have a certain look and they were all at the Café de Flore that night) and we were very tired we just looked at all the Sartre-wannabes and went on down the street.

There was even a chap sitting at the corner table with his notebook and he was doing his best to look like a great philosopher writing down the few words that would make him immortal or at least for fifteen-minutes and people would quote him and say what incredible insights he had. I felt like giving him the finger and telling him his ideas were shit but maybe it was at that moment he wrote, in his pooffy little lined notepad that were really all ‘just passing little viruses in an unraveling universe’ and all us humans would read his stupid insights and realise that we are really nothing more than nothing more.

So that was our trip to Paris. We had a lovely little flat in the eleventh thingie and it really was as if we lived there even though only for a week. Now I am back at work and already totally stressed out. But reading Dylan’s little book has inspired me to go back to finishing my story; ‘Leaving Australia’ that I did not work on at all last year.

1. Grey goo, or gray goo, is a term to refer to a hypothetical end-of-the-world event involving molecular nanotechnology in which out-of-control self-replicating robots consume all living matter on Earth while building more of themselves (a scenario known as ecophagy). From, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grey_goo. Sited Saturday, January 07, 2006